Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab is a sapphic vampire novel that doesn’t conform to any one genre, following three different women from three different time periods. It’s a darkly empowering tale about hunger, love, and rage.
María, a stunning and wild young woman, has big dreams and an insatiable hunger for something more. In 1532 Santo Domingo de la Calzada, though, a woman like her is only destined to serve at the whims and wants of men. Until one day a mysterious widow offers her a way out.
Charlotte finds herself thrust unwillingly into London society in 1827 after her brother catches her kissing a girl. Her well-respected aunt sets out to mold her into the perfect, demure picture of propriety. Instead, a woman at a ball changes her life forever.
Alice is a college freshman at Harvard in 2019, lost in the way so many eighteen-year-old girls are. She wants a new start, to make friends, and to be comfortable in her own skin. One night, one party, and one woman change everything, and now she’s left adrift, searching desperately for answers.
Three women, inexorably linked through hunger and pain, make up this story, moving through a world where so much changes — and so much doesn’t.
All three of these women are queer, and none of them are perfect heroines. None of them are “good”, the admirable goddesses we want female protagonists to be. Instead, they are the morally grey anti-heroes of their own stories. Their actions throughout the book are not exactly laudable, or even forgivable, but understandable nonetheless.
It’s this imperfection, this brutal truth, that makes these women such incredible characters to read. The three women are so very different, yet with so much in common, and all three of them are incredibly well-developed throughout the story. It’s utterly fascinating to watch them change with the pace of the story.
Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil features such engaging prose with language that is so beautiful. Reading this book feels like eating a decadent chocolate mousse. I just wanted to savor it.
A primal grace that makes men turn their heads and their horses in the direction of the hunt.
This story feels tangible somehow. Yes, it is about vampires, but the rest of it is so grounded in reality, and the description of that reality is so detailed and paints a picture that’s both gritty and strangely beautiful.
The plot is so suspenseful, especially in the beginning when the reader isn’t sure what is about to happen, but can feel the story building to something dramatic.
Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil is, at its core, about female rage. No matter the era, no matter the circumstance, women have a damn lot to be angry about, and this book captures those feelings artfully.
This world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.
This book is not a romance, although there are romantic moments interspersed, with subtle spice that just occasionally makes an appearance to add a rich texture to the story. These are primarily fade-to-black moments that invite the reader to use their imagination.
Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil draws together three different stories of three different women like tangled roots to make up this stunning tale of rage and want. It is a must-read of 2025 and one that I’ll be recommending to anyone who will listen for years to come.
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